2015/02/09

The Underworld Service
(2014) is the latest album from English Heretic. Released last year ahead of
some welcome re-issues from the project and the upcoming imprint Eighth Climate,
Underworld rightly received some great reviews from the likes of Freqand The Quietus. It’s probably the highest profile English Heretic release
thus far and works in essence as a summation of the project’s decade-long ‘voyage’.
All of the key themes are here: landscape, the occult, the theme of visitation,
horror cinema and unconscious geographies. When taken as the follow-up to Anti-Heroes (2013) or seen in the light
of Temple of Remembrance(2005) though, The Underworld Service follows a very
different tonal path. The package is marked with the same care and sense of immersion
that has characterized other English Heretic releases. However, the overall
theme of katabasis, (descent, a going down) forms a darker counterpoint to the
exploratory trajectories of Anti-Heroes.

Here’s how English Heretic present the album:

"After a decade of toil in the blood drenched, worm
eaten, occult battlefields of Albion, English Heretic takes a well earned holiday... in
Hades. The Underworld Service
is a 70 minute radio broadcast from Tartarus, where every song and news report is an intimation of our mortality. The Underworld Service subverts the culture show format and celebrates the hard
hitting documentary format. Scanning a waveband of Corpse
Oriented Rock, Philosophical Stoner,
Field Trip Hop, Horror Folk, and
Funereal Disco, The Underworld
Service is English Heretic’s
most death enhancing release to date."

On Anti-Heroes
English Heretic channeled the psychopathologies and psycheogeographies of Psychomania(1973), Robert Cochrane and
Robert Vaughan. These misanthropes and renegade scientists were narrated as patron
saints of the death drive, launching into oblivion with ecstasy and relief. The
various synchronicities plotted also outlined a powerful associative zone
across the space surveyed by the project. This “lunatic corridor” that is said
to move through slough and its environs works appears as a combination of
Ballard’s “geography of sensory deprivation” described in Kingdom Come (2006) and the neurological after-effects of the
visitations in The Mothman Prophecies
(2002). Despite the negative trajectories
plotted, it seemed that Anti-Heroes still positioned itself as part of a
visionary tradition. A comparison could be made with the Iain Sinclair / Alan
Moore matrix of White Chappell Scarlett
Tracings (1987) and From Hell (1999).
Each work comprehensively dissects an area to reveal a series of hidden
patterns. Whilst the narratives are aggressive in their depicted violence, the conceptual
impetus is apocalyptic in the most literal sense: the movement towards an act of
revealing.

By focusing less on thanatosis and more on katabasis, (or more specifically ‘sepulculture’), The
Underworld Service positions itself very much on the other side of the
mirror. Here, death is not (anti) heroic but a phenomenon associated with a set
of ritual practices, all of which are seen to have lost their instrumental
potency in the mid to late 20th century. The culture of the
late-1960s is a familiar territory for English Heretic, but in The Sacred Geography of British Cinema (2005),
the location traces of Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder
General (1968) provided a means of charging or “fecundating” the imagination.
With The Underworld Service there is
the sense that the land and the national culture is so suffused with death
(there is a running concern with World in
Action and its broadcast sense of eternal war) that it’s excess has
outstripped any imaginative capacity to process it. As such, the key film
mediated here is Peter Newbrook’s TheAsphyx(1972), the grim story of an
(inevitably) doomed attempt to capture the spirit of death. Another scene that springs to mind is the end
of Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond(1981).
Lost in a seemingly endless underworld, Catriona McColl and David Warbeck “face
the sea of darkness” and disappear. Particularly listening to the album’s title
track it seems as if The Underworld
Service is pitched in a similar terminal zone.

This is not to say that The
Underworld Service falls short of the bar set by other English Heretic
releases. On the contrary, I think the focus on katabasis gives the project’s overall
emphasis on inner cinema and the validity of individual psychic events something
of a critical trajectory. The album is just as hermetic and ‘underground’
(literally and metaphorically) as its predecessors, but it also appears
directed towards cultural rather than individual exploration. The England it
unfolds is pervaded with death, corporeal and institutional. Horror cinema is
presented as an ambivalent axis or crossroads between ‘real world’ atrocities
and misdirected moral crusades that aim largely toward the limitation of creative
impulses (see: ‘Video Anxieties’). The album works to foreground this, with
much of the same attitude and provocation evident in The Plague Yard (1990) Simon Dwyer’s dissection of the culture /
counterculture interface in the late 1980s. What emerges is an encouragement to re-think
and re-vivify the mediatory processes linked to death, dying and associated
thanoteric forms.

Between 2003 and 2009 I ran a microcinema from the back of my car. The programme offered focused exclusively on works of cult film and ‘para-cinema’ and the screenings were staged in small, ‘unofficial’ venues: cellars, bars, kitchens, classrooms, front rooms and bomb shelters. These events began, in part, as acts of practical research into the connection between projection and place: venues were chosen for the purposes of creating something of a dialogue with the film (or more specifically, video) that was shown. Over the course of six years the project grew and assumed an increasingly mobile format. This involved the production of screenings at festivals, raves and academic conferences. Two nationwide tours of the UK were also undertaken which saw screenings mounted in nightclubs, in museums and alongside various live bands.

A basement show during the 2005 Fleapit tour

In this talk, I will discuss the screening project in more detail and expand upon some of its theoretical aspects. Reference will be made to a wider context of ‘underground’ (sometimes literally underground) film exhibition that the project drew upon and participated in. In keeping with the forms of practice discussed and the approach of the book that the project now feeds into, sections of the talk will be intentionally autobiographical and speculative. One aim will be to map the cultural terrain inhabited by the events considered, a territory in which image projection elides into forms of psychological projection.

About Me

Strange Dimensions: A Paranthropology Anthology

Collection of essays edited by Jack Hunter features my essay on William Burroughs, magick and recording technology. Available now.

Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts

Annotated screenplay text with archival dossier, unpublished writings and a series of new essays. Nohzone Archive.

Framework 52: Things Fall Apart.

2 volume set of texts, documents, extracts, photographs and essays covering the life and work of Peter Whitehead. Available now from Wayne State University Press.

Selections from the Nohzone Archive.

Collection of rare photographs and previously unpublished documents covering the production of Peter Whitehead's films between 1965 and 1969. Part of the digital resource collection 'Rock n Roll, Counterculture, Peace and Protest'. Available now from Adam Matthew Digital.

Crash Cinema: Representation in Film

Collection of essays edited by Mark Goodall, Jill Good and Will Godfrey featuring my essay on Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls (1962). Available now from Cambridge Scholar's Press.

Telegraph for Garlic

Collection of essays on Bram Stoker's Dracula edited by Samia Ounoughi that features my essay on Dracula and phonography. Available now from Red Rattle Books.